A system may crash if the kernel
encounters an illegal condition from which it cannot recover.
In such a case, it will ``panic'' and save its memory
contents to the dump device before it stops running or ``crashes''.
The default dump device is the swap area, /dev/swap,
but you can redefine this as described in
``Defining the default dump device''.
An example of when the system might panic would be if it
encountered an uninitialized pointer in a third-party device
driver.
The memory image of a system that
has crashed due to a system panic is also known
variously as a ``crash dump'' or a
``panic dump''.

NOTE:
If the system was swapping when the panic occurred, the memory
image may overwrite some of the pages being swapped. In such
cases, not all the system information will be available to crash.

The memory dump saved after a panic
contains information that can be used
with any of the crash commands
that are used on a live system
as well as the panic and trace reports
that give information about the state of the kernel
when the system panicked.
For more information about handling system crashes, see
Chapter 13, ``Troubleshooting system-level problems'' in the SCO OpenServer Handbook.